Power Move con

Hi @Sleepysusie Can I ask how much your monthly weekday percentage differed from the target 13.5%?

If it wasn’t wildly out, there are some good suggestions elsewhere in the forum about tweaking things a bit for the Nov and Dec incentives.  Sounds like you’ve already got a head start with being out at work between 4 and 7?

Best wishes, let us know what you think…

It isn't really a 'con' but if you're a low user of grid electricity anyway it is proportionally much harder to hit the target use 4-7pm. 

We use about 5-6kWh a day on average which really isn't much above what I'd consider to be what most households need just to get by. So even by shifting our usage we hit the target but only by about 1%. No idea how people are getting scores like 3-7%. 

Yes, it was 13.85%

It is not a con as there are many of us who do achieve every month.

This is a scheme to reduce usage at a particular time when demand is high. It is not a scheme that will suit everyone especially those who have low general usage, it is more suitable to households who have high usage and can move some of that usage out of peak times to help reduce the demand at that time.

It is a shame that scheme doesn't work for you but there are a wide range of schemes out there with many different providers which are aimed at different kind of users. 

I have economy 10 heating, 5 hours during the night and 5 hours split into two during the day and evening. September I received £15 credit, but then my heating wasn’t on….Storage heaters cannot be switched on and off like gas central heating. So, perhaps it’s that. 

It's not a con, I've managed to hit the target every month since I signed up. I have an electric shower which I either use in the morning or after 7pm (when I'm on nightshift). I've also started eating my "evening" meal at 4ish so I'm actually preparing it from 3:30 onwards. I've always used my washing machine and dishwasher through the night or first thing in the morning so nothing"s changed there. Now that it's getting dark at 4pm though, I might struggle to hit the target. I sat in the dark for an hour the other night but I've decided that I definitely won't be doing that again, Power Move target or not.

I have economy 10 to run storage heating, I can’t switch them on and off like gas central heating.

of course switching off gas heating isn’t going to save much electricity.

@Sleepysusie

“have economy 10 heating, 5 hours during the night and 5 hours split into two during the day and evening. September I received £15 credit, but then my heating wasn’t on….Storage heaters cannot be switched on and off like gas central heating. So, perhaps it’s that. “

Could well be…the nighttime part shouldn’t affect the Power Move (actually it might even make your weekday 4-7 slot “look good” by comparison, but I wonder how much of your evening storage heating is set to run between 4 and 7? It would be good to switch any storage heating out of that (weekend) slot if you could, otherwise the rest of the Economy10 heating mightn’t impact on the Power Move?

Sorry, I meant of course shift economy out of that key weekday 4-7 slot!!

Doh!

Sorry, you are missing the point here….I cannot turn off and turn my electric storage heating between 4pm and 7pm because that’s roughly when the off peak for these heaters are on. Then of course if I did switch them off during that window, it affects my overall tariff. Shut them off when it’s a warm day, they take 36 hours to cool down. Cold day…another 36 hours to warm up. Gas central heating, radiators heat when needed quickly, turn them off when warm, they cool down quickly. Seeing as Gas will be struck off in the near future my local authority are installing these Dimplex Quantum heaters. Uncontrollable. I’ve bought panel heaters which are cheaper to run. Thankfully my house can take full advantage of the sun all day, even in winter it’s a bonus.

Unable to, as it’s fixed hours. When the storage heating is on storing heat during the 10 hours, I can’t change that. Look up Economy 7 and Economy 10. 

OK, thanks @Sleepysusie I hadn’t fully understood… sounds as though, to have any chance at all of hitting this incentive, you’re going to have a struggle. The only slight plus which you might be able to work to your advantage is that, as the incentive works by calculating your weekday peak usage as a percentage of your overall weekday usage, aggregated at month end for however many weekdays are in the month, your peak 4-7 usage is actually not much higher (if in fact it is higher at all?) than the average for any other 3 hour slot?

Please excuse my clumsy way of expressing all this, I hope it’s clearer than mud! The trick with this incentive is to make your weekday peak hours usage roughly between a seventh and an eighth (13.5%) of your overall weekday 24 hour usage. And as the 4-7 slot is exactly an eighth of the 24 hours, that’s your challenge: to make the 4-7 slot “look better than the average”! 
 

Good luck, let us know how you think you can proceed, even given the difficulties with the Economy10? For example, how do your half-hourly figures for, say, the 4 weekdays 1,2,3, and 6 November look so far this month? Do they look in the ballpark of 13.5% or are they wildly out?  Your earlier figure of 13.85% for October looks pretty good to me, well done on that! Bodes well surely for Nov and Dec with just a couple of tiny tweaks somewhere to hit the 13.5%?

Well unless you have old high wattage bulbs then it won't make much difference anyway.

Mine are 8.5 watt standard bayonet fitting bulbs. That's 0.0085 kWh per bulb when switched on.

You can buy them anywhere. I got a box  of 12 from Amazon around 4 years ago,  only one has failed in those 4 years.

Unless you have something like the old 100/150/250 watt incandescents then sitting in the dark for an hour isn't going to save much electricity at all.

My living room bulbs (the ones that I'll be mostly using) are energy saving ones so I'll find out mid-month how much more electricity usage they've added on. 

You could check your IHD in the meantime (make sure it’s set to kWh, not £) by switching on your living room light(s) over half an hour or so in daylight, maybe at the weekend? Or check your online account Usage pages for, say, 1,2,3,6 Nov rather than waiting for mid-month?

Good luck with it! I wouldn’t elect to sit in the dark either! Or indeed in the cold. Trying to tweak the many small-ish background tasks that are constantly going on in the house (like reasonable levels of LED lighting, LED TV, central heating pump, ‘fridge/freezer, router etc.) don’t really impact on the PowerMove challenge as they don’t only happen in the peak 4-7 slot, it’s the big hitters that occur during 4-7 that make the impact.

Just wondering, Walt - have you checked the rating of the TV? I’ve no idea whether mine’s LED or not, but it’s a real power-glutton compared to the other things on your list, at around 100W. 

Hi @Firedog Believe it or not, I can’t find the rating plate - I suspect it may be hidden now behind the telescopic arm! However, when we’re watching it, it ticks away at around 35 Watts. It’s only an inexpensive little (32”?) two-year old Logic, we don’t use our bigger old Sony beast, which is a nice TV (maybe 15 years old now!) in the living room any more (for the last couple of years we’ve  pretty much lived in the conservatory full time!), which has surround sound and DVD boxes hanging off it. Goodness know what the Sony would gobble up!
 

This little Logic one only has a small Now box…very economical, if basic! I believe this is the model: LOGIK L32HE20 32" HD Ready LED TV.

I wonder whether yours is perhaps a plasma screen, or, like our old Sony, is pre-streamlined LED jobbies, or has a few boxes connected to it? And of course you can alter stuff like the brightness level etc.

Actually @Firedog you've got me thinking afresh about what might be called “normal” or “background” household consumption…i.e. everything except big stuff that’s switched on deliberately to do a specific major task like cook or wash or boil water (and not including thermostats and pumps to run gas-fired DHW or CH). 
 

I don’t think I can remember anyone actually suggesting what they find their background usage is on average? I notice mine peaks very rarely at 320-odd watts for a few minutes when presumably the little chest freezer and the combination ‘fridge/freezer all kick in together with other small stuff. But normally things tick along at highs of 230 Watts for a few minutes followed by lots of lows around 50/60 Watts for minutes on end.

It seems that daytime usage averages are around 100Wh, with nighttime consumption  (including evening and sleep time) would be just under that. The TV often finishes around 9PM, and we only use one main light until bedtime (plus usually reading for a while in bed). The PV panels up here in Sunderland over the dark months don’t always help much.  For November so far we’ve generated an average of just under 2kWh per day, exported 0.4kWh per day on average, and bought just under 1kWh per day on average (washing machine on the 5th, which was a sunny day here generating 3.1 kWh). So, roughly, we consume 2.5 kWh per 24 hours (generation minus export, and plus bought import), which equates to roughly 100 Watts averaged out over the day and night. However, all this is factoring in the fact that our small 2.4kW storage battery is on “running the house” so to speak from 1615 until 0800, and recharges between 0830 and 1600. 
 

The six months or so of summertime consumption is obviously hugely different again, averaging between 3 and 5 bought kWh per month, whereas in the six months of winter we can find ourselves buying around 7 or 8 kWh per week. At least. Depending on whether we get some days with zero rooftop generation (it does happen from time to time in winter).

So, ours is a smallish NE mid-terrace, and we are fairly vigilant with our consumption, but I don’t believe there is any way on earth we could buy (import) less winter electricity than 1 to 1.5 kWh per day.

This Power Move incentive has been a brilliant way of concentrating our minds on peak time usage, because until Power Move we just lumped usage into the two categories of daylight versus darkness! 

It sure has, but not just for peak time. I was surprised when I viewed my Usage histograms for recent months and turned on the comparison to a year ago. There is a significant difference: in September, for example, my average daily usage was only ²/₃  of last year’s, so I must be doing something better than last year.

The measure of background usage that I find helpful is that for the three hours 02:30 - 05:30. I hope that I’ve seen to it that nothing inessential is running during the night, so unless an amorous pair of foxes were to trigger the outside security lights, what I use then should represent the ‘sine qua non’, so to speak. The the difference between this and the 4-7PM value should give clues to where economies might be made.
 

Re TVs: I have an archaic 32” Sony. I just switched it on to see what it was using, and I was a bit shocked when my IHD reported 100W. It’s only about 75W when I launch it from standby, though, which goes to show how much that standby mode might be costing.

Hi Noel @Firedog very interesting stuff…I like your idea of the 2.30-5.30 benchmark 3 hours, definitely worth logging to use as a comparator. Amorous foxes permitting! Actually, I’ve taken to switching off our yard PIR in winter as we sometimes spot it being triggered randomly. Not very secure, obvs, but with a nearby streetlight it’s really to give us extra light for the bins and for (expected!) callers.

Alarming how much stealth standby usage can cost, as in your TV example: not exactly stealth as such but years ago, well before the recent energy price hikes, we ditched our mains alarm clock, we worked out it was costing us 30 quid a year or something to run. We used to have a Teasmade, too, at one time in distant memory. Happy days, simple pleasures!

Regards….

I've done my background usage - by switching everything off and then looking at the IHD as I turned them on one at a time, then off do the next.

I put it all in a thread somewhere, but from memory:

4 watts smoke/co alarms (always on can only be turned off at the mains consumer unit).

3 W boiler control/timer alone.

85 W boiler on, pump running.

11 W broadband router (and attached drive).

90 W fridge/freezer running.

11 W laptop, plugged in, battery fully charged. (Both my 8-10 yo laptops the same).

60 W washing machine, 80 W on full spin.

I won't go on but I've done most things from each plate of the cooker hob, the air fryer, microwave, etc down to the kitchen and bathroom extractor fans.

The one that I found the most surprising is that my gas combi boiler takes 85 W when just a tap is turned on. That implies that it's using the pump where I thought it would just use mains pressure.

So if nothing like the fridge or boiler is running then the other “always on” things use a background of 20 watts.

(Alarms, router, boiler timer, get to 18 and then 1 or 2 for things like the IHD itself, the phone base station, etc).

I like the idea of checking the background usage and how much watts everything takes to run but I don't have an IHD. There wasn't one when I moved in and when I asked OVO (or it might have been SSE) for a new one, they said no. Can you buy an IHD yourself and would it be easy enough to connect it to the Smart Meter? 

Your wish is my command, O Master of the Lamp.

Thanks for that Blastoise186! Very informative link.